(no subject)

Well, my sister was right when she said I was likely to wake up in the middle of the night and have an awful time getting back to sleep. I tried anyway and only gave up after Scott left for work. Maybe I'll be able to nap later. Maybe.

My right shoulder, all the way up to my neck, is tight and hurting. Scott massaged it a little in between when he awoke (his alarm didn't go off, but he was awake anyway) and when he got up. That helped a little. I think it's more stress than me sleeping on it wrong, but who knows? Usually, stress is on both sides equally.

I dropped out of iddyiddybangbang last night. The completion deadline isn't until some time in October, but I really don't know what's going to be happening or how long it will be before I'm writing again. If I need chemo or radiation, I may not end up even doing Yuletide. I think it's a really, really good thing I didn't end up signing up for any exchanges after Remix. I kind of suspect that I'd have ended up defaulting. I also stopped watching writethisfanfic, a writing community I've been fairly active in. It has daily check in posts, and they've been making me feel guilty for not writing. I usually do a week of check in posts for the community every month, but I didn't sign up to this month because the week I did in July was a lot harder than it should have been. I was pretty sure August would be worse.

I'm starting to think about light things that I can read in the time leading up to the surgery and during the recovery time. I've got two or three hundred long fics on my ereader, but I'm not sure I know where the charging cord is for that. Also, 90% of those stories pure shots in the dark. I looked for longish, complete, G or T rated stories on AO3 in fandoms I kind of sort of know but haven't really read much. Anything that fit that and had a blurb that made grammatical sense and seemed to be plotty rather than romance focused or fluffy, I downloaded. That was more than a year ago, so I likely could find more now. I'm not sure I'm ready to look, though.

I am probably going to make a post later, looking for author recommendations for commercially published stuff. I will be looking for popcorn books, mainly. So far, I've made two lists, one list of authors that I can pretty much be certain I'll be able to read and one list of authors that I can be certain of reading a certain specific chunk of their output. I'm currently annotating the second list to explain what I can and can't read and (if I know) why.

I'm not entirely sure how to address the fact that I'm mostly reading non-fiction these days. I'm not sure I can call those popcorn books exactly, but they're often easier for me right now than fiction. It's just harder to explain in non-fiction categories what I can and can't read because I'm still figuring it out by trial and error.

Scott want to try to get time off to go with me to the surgeon next week, but the fact that we won't know when the appointment is until Tuesday is a big barrier. He still plans to try, but if, for example, they call Tuesday morning and want me in Tuesday afternoon, there's damn all he can do to get there. I can't call him at work. I can call the central office and attempt to convince them that it's an emergency, but if I do that and they don't agree, Scott will get in huge trouble.

I really do want someone to go with me. Scott's mother, however, is recovering from pneumonia. I don't think either Scott's father or I would be comfortable with him going. Scott's sister is booked solid until mid-afternoon on Thursday while Thursday afternoon and Friday between 11 and 3 are the least convenient times for me all week. All of our friends work or have child care obligations.

I told Cordelia last night that the test I had on Thursday was to find out more about the lump in my breast and that they found out that it's bad so they're going to take it out. I think I connected it to my sister's surgery which Cordelia knows was for cancer, but she may have missed that or simply not wanted to hear it. Her previous awareness of cancer comes from her school's beloved PE teacher dying of it a couple of years ago.

(no subject)

Well, my sister was right when she said I was likely to wake up in the middle of the night and have an awful time getting back to sleep. I tried anyway and only gave up after Scott left for work. Maybe I'll be able to nap later. Maybe.

My right shoulder, all the way up to my neck, is tight and hurting. Scott massaged it a little in between when he awoke (his alarm didn't go off, but he was awake anyway) and when he got up. That helped a little. I think it's more stress than me sleeping on it wrong, but who knows? Usually, stress is on both sides equally.

I dropped out of iddyiddybangbang last night. The completion deadline isn't until some time in October, but I really don't know what's going to be happening or how long it will be before I'm writing again. If I need chemo or radiation, I may not end up even doing Yuletide. I think it's a really, really good thing I didn't end up signing up for any exchanges after Remix. I kind of suspect that I'd have ended up defaulting. I also stopped watching writethisfanfic, a writing community I've been fairly active in. It has daily check in posts, and they've been making me feel guilty for not writing. I usually do a week of check in posts for the community every month, but I didn't sign up to this month because the week I did in July was a lot harder than it should have been. I was pretty sure August would be worse.

I'm starting to think about light things that I can read in the time leading up to the surgery and during the recovery time. I've got two or three hundred long fics on my ereader, but I'm not sure I know where the charging cord is for that. Also, 90% of those stories pure shots in the dark. I looked for longish, complete, G or T rated stories on AO3 in fandoms I kind of sort of know but haven't really read much. Anything that fit that and had a blurb that made grammatical sense and seemed to be plotty rather than romance focused or fluffy, I downloaded. That was more than a year ago, so I likely could find more now. I'm not sure I'm ready to look, though.

I am probably going to make a post later, looking for author recommendations for commercially published stuff. I will be looking for popcorn books, mainly. So far, I've made two lists, one list of authors that I can pretty much be certain I'll be able to read and one list of authors that I can be certain of reading a certain specific chunk of their output. I'm currently annotating the second list to explain what I can and can't read and (if I know) why.

I'm not entirely sure how to address the fact that I'm mostly reading non-fiction these days. I'm not sure I can call those popcorn books exactly, but they're often easier for me right now than fiction. It's just harder to explain in non-fiction categories what I can and can't read because I'm still figuring it out by trial and error.

Scott want to try to get time off to go with me to the surgeon next week, but the fact that we won't know when the appointment is until Tuesday is a big barrier. He still plans to try, but if, for example, they call Tuesday morning and want me in Tuesday afternoon, there's damn all he can do to get there. I can't call him at work. I can call the central office and attempt to convince them that it's an emergency, but if I do that and they don't agree, Scott will get in huge trouble.

I really do want someone to go with me. Scott's mother, however, is recovering from pneumonia. I don't think either Scott's father or I would be comfortable with him going. Scott's sister is booked solid until mid-afternoon on Thursday while Thursday afternoon and Friday between 11 and 3 are the least convenient times for me all week. All of our friends work or have child care obligations.

I told Cordelia last night that the test I had on Thursday was to find out more about the lump in my breast and that they found out that it's bad so they're going to take it out. I think I connected it to my sister's surgery which Cordelia knows was for cancer, but she may have missed that or simply not wanted to hear it. Her previous awareness of cancer comes from her school's beloved PE teacher dying of it a couple of years ago.

(no subject)

And one of our friends just brought by a peach pie. That's really wonderful and just what I needed. it makes me feel less alone (Cordelia's still asleep as far as I can tell and probably won't come out of her room much even when she does wake up). The friend also pointed out that her partner is retired and so might be available to go with me to the surgeon's appointment if it turns out that Scott can't. I don't know her as well as I do the friend who brought the pie, but I think I would be fine with her company. Both women were my mother's friends when I was in high school, but, in age, they're mid-way between me and Scott and my mother, and their son is a year younger than Cordelia. I don't think the one who brought the pie is more than ten years older than I am.

I am debating between pie and more coffee and lying down to see if I can nap. Both are very very tempting. I can nap and then have pie and coffee later, but I can't have pie and coffee and then nap, at least not without waiting a long time.

Book Recommendation Request

I still, of course, have no idea when my surgery will be. My sister has mentioned the possibility that they'll want to do an MRI before the surgery, since my breasts are very dense, just to make sure they're not missing anything. The thing about that is that a breast MRI has to be done during an approximately ten day window in a woman's cycle. My next period will start some time between the 20th and the 10th (I'm pretty irregular). I'm not sure how long after that the MRI would be. I was really hoping that the surgery could be very, very soon so that I could put the whole thing out of my mind and not spend weeks and weeks stressing out.

I am thinking, though, that I may want to buy some e-books to put on my e-reader, assuming I can actually find the power cord for it. I have a lot of fics on there, but I think I'm going to want very specifically light reading. If I weren't expecting to have difficulty holding something as heavy as a hardcover book, I'd probably just put holds on a couple of dozen non-fiction books that sound interesting, but I don't think that will work.

So I'm looking for recommendations. I've put together two lists of authors. The first is authors that I currently can always read without anxiety issues. The second is authors I usually like and can sometimes read without anxiety issues. I don't claim that everything on this list is high art or necessarily anything but popcorn/cotton candy reading.

Romances and mysteries are exceedingly hit or miss for me. I like middle grade books but often end up not finishing them because I identify more strongly with the parents than the protagonists.

( The authors I can pretty much always read )

( Authors I can only sometimes read )